Indian Logic Part 02

Author(s): Nagin J Shah
Publisher: Sanskrit Sanskriti Granthmala

Page 41

30
INDIAN LOGIC
the second and third views Jayanta reports them at due length because they were the views so much current in his times. So we might now follow him in his account of these two views.
The upholders of the second view, called 'Acāryas', submit that when an elderly person shows to a novice the entity possessing branches, etc. of a certain type and says to him 'here is a jack-fruit tree' the cognition had by the novice is certainly produced through the instrumentality of a sense-organ but since it is also produced through the instrumentality of a word it is classified as a verbal cognition; thus on their showing, it is such a cognition which though born of a sense-object contact is in fact verbal is eliminated from the purview of the proposed definition of perception through the insertion of the word ‘non-verbal'. 60 To this they add that the verbal cognition in question is a plain case of verbal testimony — a recognized pramāna— inasmuch as the novice in question tells others : ‘Through the words of that person have I learnt that here is a jackfruit tree'; thus on their showing, had it been a case of perceptual cognition he would have said : “Through my eyes have I learnt that here is a jack-fruit tree'.61 Lastly they argue that this is why the Nyāyasūtra definition of verbal testimony does not say that a senseorgan must not have been employed in its case while the present definition of perception says that a word must not have been employed in its case.62
The upholders of the third view; here called 'Vyākhyātrs' (they being later called 'Pravaras), oppose the second view on the ground that a cognition which is produced through the instrumentality of a sense-organ as well as a word should be called either both perception and verbal testimony or neither, their point being that since both the alternatives are absurd the line dividing perception from verbal testimony should be drawn somewhere else.63 On their part the Vyākhyātrs submit that the proposed definition of perception contains the word 'non-verbal' with a view to repudiating the suggestion that all cognition born of a sense-object contact, since it necessarily involves an employment of words, is verbal, a suggestion implying that there is nothing called perceptual cognition; the opponent's point is that whenever an object is cognized as x or y it is always cognized as accompanied by the word 'x' or 'y', the word concerned being either actually heard or just recalled; and then he goes on to argue that even when eyes are employed to see the thing and ears to hear the word